Multimedia verification requires not only accurate decisions but also traceable evidence, reliable human correction, and safe reuse of prior experience. Existing systems often lack explicit mechanisms for revising intermediate reasoning or preventing harmful knowledge transfer. We present SEMV (Self-Evolving Multimedia Verification), a self-evolving multi-agent framework that treats provenance-bearing arguments as the interface between evidence, reasoning, human contestation, and memory. SEMV combines arena-based quantitative bipolar argumentation (A-QBAF), causal and scoped revision, and verification-gated memory consolidation with explicit conflict retention. On COSMOS benchmark, SEMV achieves 91.88% accuracy versus 89.10% for the strongest comparable baseline. Verified memory reduces negative transfer from 5.7% to 0.2%. On CTR benchmark, constructed from reviewer contestations, scoped causal revision corrects 96.7% of initial errors while saving 52.8% compute. MV2026 Grand Challenge dataset further supports evidence-grounded, temporally consistent reporting. These results show that SEMV can evolve through verified experience while keeping accumulated knowledge and subsequent decisions traceable, revisable, and contestable.
Multimedia verification requires not only accurate conclusions but also transparent and contestable reasoning. We propose a contestable multi-agent framework that integrates multimodal large language models, external verification tools, and arena-based quantitative bipolar argumentation (A-QBAF) as a submission to the ICMR 2026 Grand Challenge on Multimedia Verification. Our method decomposes each case into claim-centered sections, retrieves targeted evidence, and converts evidence into structured support and attack arguments with provenance and strength scores. These arguments are resolved through small local argument graphs with selective clash resolution and uncertainty-aware escalation. The resulting system generates section-wise verification reports that are transparent, editable, and computationally practical for real-world multimedia verification. Our implementation is public at: https://github.com/Analytics-Everywhere-Lab/MV2026_the_liems.
Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Hoang-Loc Cao +3
Multimodal agents operating in long-horizon environments must build and continually update multimedia memories to support entity-consistent, temporally grounded reasoning. However, existing agentic memory approaches often discard fine-grained dentity cues under aggressive compression and segment-wise processing. They also rely heavily on vector similarity retrieval, which can surface semantically related yet identity-mismatched evidence, leading to entity confusion, error propagation, and hallucinated answers. We propose ViSAGE, a multimodal agentic memory framework that constructs self-correcting, entity-centric memories. Specifically, ViSAGE anchors entity identity via cross-modal binding over long temporal ranges. It then applies bidirectional memory refinement to propagate delayed identity evidence, retroactively unifying historical records and improving future reasoning. We also introduce multi-agent cross-verification to assess retrieved evidence under an identity-evidence alignment onstraint, enabling abstention instead of unsupported answers when evidence is missing. Extensive results demonstrate that ViSAGE consistently outperforms the strongest baseline, achieving 5.9% higher accuracy.
Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit. We present SEVA, a structured verification agent that emits evidence alignments, step-by-step reasoning chains, calibrated confidence, and a six-category error diagnosis with actionable fixes. Training such an agent with RL is non-trivial: standard binary reward on multi-component output triggers advantage collapse -- within-group reward variance vanishes and the GRPO gradient disappears. We resolve this with a process reward that decomposes verification quality into five independent components weighted 70/30 toward process signals, restoring the gradient and inducing an implicit curriculum -- the agent first masters verification behavior (alignment 0.917 -> 0.997, format 72% -> 100%), then outcomes (F1 64.9 -> 69.0). Structured output further enables a Verify -> Reflect -> Probe -> Refine self-evolution loop, which over four rounds on a 7B model surfaces an unexpected structural finding: each round produces a benchmark-specialist, not a generalist (+15 pp on HaluEval, -10 to -14 pp on TruthfulQA in the same model, persistent at 4x data). On ClearFacts, SEVA-3B matches GPT-4o-mini (69.0 vs. 69.8 F1) while producing substantially richer, auditable output -- confirming a principle that should generalize: for any RL task with multi-component generation, reward granularity must match output granularity.